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Need to Learn Basic Web design

What's up Antionline? Been a while.

So I recently decided that I want to get out of the oilfield and back into computers. I've got a lot of experience w/ help desk and general IT tech work. Most of the jobs I've seen posted here require at least some website design and maintenance. I know very basic HTML. I can set up an Apache server and create a "Hello, World" page very easily, maybe even throw a table or two w/ hyperlinks and pretty colors in there, and that's about it.

I was hoping someone could give me some idea of what I should do to "learn web design fast." I have no experience w/ Dreamweaver, etc. Does anyone "hardcode" websites anymore? Is Javascript still mainstream? What's the norm?

I'm unemployed, so I can't afford expensive books or software. One job in particular that I'd like to apply for involves "creative" website design for a small-time attorney's office. Another involves basic web design and maintenance for a medium sized university. I've got a couple of books on HTML w/ CSS and Javascript.

Any ideas, thoughts, questions, comments or things you'd like to think about are greatly appreciated. Thanks AO.

You'll probably get different answers depending upon who you ask, but in my opinion no real professional uses dream weaver, at least not in WYSIWYG mode. Some people use it just as a color coded text editor but there's much cheaper ones out there. So in my estimation yes, real professionals write code directly.

JavaScript is still really the only client side scripting, outside of flash if you want to go that way. If anything JavaScript has branched out, even more. There are now a number of JavaScript libraries out there. I still prefer to write my own, but some jobs immediately ask you which library you use. I guess they want standardized code. Understandable I guess.

As far as server side scripting goes, it's really wide open. All the following languages are in use: PHP, java, c#, VB.net, and probably a few others I'm not thinking of.

Aww come on Joe! Perl and Python are like... Well, OK, so not every page is using it I guess that's a point to consider. But either way, if you're going to become ANY kind of good Web Service person, at least an understanding of Perl and Python would be of great help considering that the servers the pages will run on is going to probably be using at least one of those for something.

I also have Python for Windows, and Perl. I find them useful in a lot of stuff, especially when Java Script isn't going to work for something. Like, if you need a certain thing to work a certain way and Java Script is not working out, Python or Perl will probably be able to handle it.

I also agree on PHP which seems required these days heh.

When I set up a web server for friends and people I knew to use for things, I used Vim to write the HTML, and then I tested it in these browsers to make sure everything was compatible:

Vim is "VI iMproved" and it's one of the original text editors. It's one of the few from that time period that's still used today, and very actively.

It's also one of the things that has been in "Holy Wars" in Hacker culture. The one with Vi / Vim is "Vi / Vim VS EMACS" as EMACS is huge, and has a lot of features, where Vim is a full screen text editor that doesn't use a GUI, and uses commands to save text, move the cursor, and in general, write something or change text. In Vim you start in Command mode, and if you want to try, you have to hit "i" which then inputs text, and then if you want to save, you hit Esc, then ":w" will write the text, and ":wq" will write it to file and quit the editor. There is a lot more obviously, but that's a basic run down.

1) Don't use Dreamweaver. This option is way to expensive. They guys at my work wanted Dreamweaver, and I convinced them to move to my option #2 below. The WYSIWYG mode can also really screw up the underlying code.

2) If you are in Windows, use Textpad (http://www.textpad.com/) This is a nice free text editor for Windows that makes coding webpages really easy. It recognizes PHP, HTML, JAVA tags...

3) If you require some server side code, you may want to consider PHP. This is the most commonly used server side scripting language and support can be found on the web all over the place.

Yeah - I've been using TextPad since I was a sophmore in college - it's a nice simple editor. I've decided after several days of searching that most developers do "hard code" their sites, and I'm beginning to teach myself (however slowly) how to build a good looking page by mimicking what other people have done on sites that look nice to me, and I d/l a few free templates to go off of.

I'll spend some time doing some trial-and-error work, and maybe I'll post some links to whatever I can create and ask for more pointers. I know that this is a security site, but doesn't look like this place gets near the traffic it used to, so I'm sure ya'll won't mind!

Also - I'm wanting to set up a sftp server on a Windows XP lappy that users can log into and upload/download files via the webpage, and have the file list w/ the file info (including the user who uploaded it, when, file size, times downloaded, etc) and implement a size restriction. Any ideas as to how I could go about doing that? I can set up an ftp server no problem, but I'm not sure how to tie that in to a webpage...

Thanks for all the help.

[edit] Also - can anyone recommend a free domain name service? I used to use .co.nr, but as I recall, it wouldn't redirect certain sorts of traffic (i.e. wiskibottle.co.nr would come up in a browser, but in a shell ssh wiskibottle.co.nr wouldn't go through while ssh 123.456.789.123 would...)[/edit]

Also - I'm wanting to set up a sftp server on a Windows XP lappy that users can log into and upload/download files via the webpage, and have the file list w/ the file info (including the user who uploaded it, when, file size, times downloaded, etc) and implement a size restriction. Any ideas as to how I could go about doing that? I can set up an ftp server no problem, but I'm not sure how to tie that in to a webpage...

[edit] Also - can anyone recommend a free domain name service? I used to use .co.nr, but as I recall, it wouldn't redirect certain sorts of traffic (i.e. wiskibottle.co.nr would come up in a browser, but in a shell ssh wiskibottle.co.nr wouldn't go through while ssh 123.456.789.123 would...)[/edit]